Pebbles in the pond

The Great Hunt

We continue our weekly story of The Great Being, the Singular Self that is living through each of us avatars. We are watching how the story unfolds on the planet Earth through the experiences of two Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, Melchizedek and Layla, here on a mission that started in 200,000 BC. They are now in a new life around 40,000 BC.

In the previous episode, Melchizedek and Layla, as Blu and Ska, had begun training the tribespeople in the Mystery Cave, where they experienced a life-changing initiation. Exercising their influence, Blu and Ska had convinced the King to allow the wives and children to experience the secrets of the Mystery Cave. Previous installments.

Naming things is more important than I ever realized, Layla (as Ska) pathed. The use of the term The Great Hunt distinguished it from solitary hunting. In The Great Hunt a team of men tracked the largest and most dangerous beasts, and would later train to hunt the most dangerous of all — their own kind. This generated the emotions that would later drive their descendants to be rabid sports fans.

It anchors a cluster of feelings and images into something retrievable, an idea, Melchizedek (as Blu) agreed, explaining why naming is so powerful. They went about their daily lives with their wives while planning their next moves.

The first Great Hunt had ended in failure, as had the second and third. The beasts were too smart, too fast and wily, and the spears had to hit just right or they were useless. The mixture of mental practice and invoking magic or cosmic fire support through prayer in the cave could not fully prepare them for the actual experience of the Hunt.

The fourth Great Hunt resulted in a miracle: the sight of the huge pig being carried with great respect back into the encampment beside the mountain lake. Although the whole tribe had been repeatedly told that they were going to see this someday, it wasn’t quite real to them until that day came. A religious conviction swept over the few thousand tribespeople in moments. They were the first group of people on Earth to sense some higher power they could actually connect to. They were instantly zealous converts to the religion known as primitive animism. While new to these tribespeople, primitive animism had been a secret belief among the women for millennia, and some men had also experienced it. The Cave Mysteries amped it up a notch or two.

Over time, Blu and Ska moved the tribe into the next room in the cave, where they learned about the Great Bison. Bringing down these even larger beasts, some weighing as much as a ton, involved much more trial and error than hunting the boar. And these experiments had cost the lives of some of the best men in the tribe, to the point where Blu’s and Ska’s popularity began to dip just a bit.

Finally, on the fifteenth Great Hunt for the Great Bison, a huge cow was brought down. Getting the cow back to camp before having it taken away by other predators turned out to be an even bigger challenge than getting a bison, and they could never have done it without multiple fire bearers, as Melchizedek had wisely anticipated.

Ultimately the tribe as it grew set up a second base a thousand feet down the mountain, where the bison lived. This made it possible to bring prey back in a shorter time and with less effort. The tribe gradually moved more and more of its members to the lower berthing, despite concerns about getting closer to the vicious tribe that had driven them up the mountain.